Luna Press Publishing's novella The Future God of Love, has been shortlisted for the African Nommo Awards; Charco Press' title, Occupation has been shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize 2022; the Bloody Scotland McIlvanney Prize 2022 longlist includes 3 titles from Canongate: May God Forgive, The Second Cut and The Corruption of Blood and 1 title from Leamington Books: The Sound of Sirens; Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Longlist 2022 includes Canongate's The Book of Form & Emptiness and HarperCollins' Threadneedle; and Brickwork: A Biography of The Arches from Salamander Street was on the shortlist for the Society for Theatre Research Book Prize.

Membership invoices were sent out last month for the next 12 months. If you have already paid or arranged to pay by instalments, thank you for that. If you haven’t but would like to pay by instalments, please follow the payment link on the invoice, choose Direct Debit and follow the steps to set up a Direct Debit mandate. After you’ve done that, please let Andrew know and he will set up the instalments for you.

If you think you have been invoiced for the wrong amount, or your turnover has dropped since last year, please let Andrew know. If you haven’t already done so, you can report your turnover using this form: https://forms.office.com/r/8HMKDUSm0p. and we can work out your subs levels and re-issue your membership invoice for the amended turnover band.

For larger organisations, who require purchase order numbers please liaise with your finance department and forward the PO number to Andrew so it can be added to your invoice.

Alice has been with Publishing Scotland for several years and been a fantastic asset to the team; she has been so helpful with running Scottsh Books International and helping us with our digital marketing. We will really miss her input.

She is leaving us to have a baby at the end of July and we wish her all the very best for this exciting new time in her life.

The theme of this year’s conference is Connect and Reflect. The conference programme addresses both facets of our work lives right now in equal measure - our drive to be more creative, do more and, ultimately, sell more books, alongside our very real need to slow down, prioritise, manage stress and set boundaries. More.

We are offering 5 places to members to attend the conference online. They will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis and we will prioritise members who have not been offered these free tickets before.

Nielsen are hosting the Publisher Seminar for independent publishers and self-published authors. Returning with a new hybrid event designed to share knowledge and expertise in everything from buying your ISBNs through to making sure your titles are listed and visible to consumers.

There are a limited number of seats available at The Society of Authors in London but you can join the live stream via Zoom.

The new round of digital funding is open for applications from Scottish publishers. Apply by 1 August.

The Go-Digital fund supports Scottish-based book publishers in bringing their books to a new digital audience. It’s administered by Publishing Scotland with the help of funding from Creative Scotland.

The costs that will normally be funded are:

For digital marketing purposes

For the services of a specialist/consultant

For attending a digital event or conference

For equipment and software necessary in supporting the digital project

For attending a training course, or arranging an in-house training course on a digital theme.

Publishers can claim costs up to a maximum of £1,500 per company.

We are partnering with ACME Scotland Comic Con to offer Publishing Scotland members access to their cornerstone event at the SECC on September 24-25. They are keen to involve more book publishers and open a new route for publishers to sell direct to the 10-15,000 expected customers per day via a dedicated retail space and expansive events programme. Keen to underline that this is not just for comics or fantasy adjacent titles – a wide range of publishing will have a strong audience there. ACME Comic Con are offering highly discounted tables to our members as a retail space for £200 + VAT.

We’ll be holding a Zoom with Sha Nazir (BHP Comics) who can talk more about the opportunities and answer any questions publishers may have regarding the event and audiences. This is looking to be 10am on Thursday 16 June, but TBC. To register interest and learn more please contact [email protected].

We are delighted to open the new round of translation funding for 2022 - an opportunity for international publishers to translate Scottish writers.

The purpose of the fund is to support publishers based outside the United Kingdom with the payment of translation fees to translate Scottish writers. Funding will be offered in the form of a grant and it is for translation costs only.

Welcome to this week's Top 20 Bestselling Scottish Books in Scotland chart. We have a new number one! Denzil Meyrick shoots up to the top spot with his latest DCI Daley thriller The Death of Remembrance.

We have new entries with the paperback release of Alexander McCall Smith’s Love in the Time of Bertie, and Christopher Brookmyre’s The Cut comes back into the chart. JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series has three entries. Canongate and Saraband continue their stay in the chart too.

Join us at our offices on Wednesday 29 June (5.30–7pm) for a BookMachine Talking Audio Watch Party.

We will be gathering to connect in person and watch the virtual event on-screen where guests from Little, Brown, Audible UK, Beat Technologies and Pan Macmillan will be discussing 'Can anything be an audiobook?'. They’ll consider how publishers have experimented creatively with traditional book genres in audio, as well as the role of original recordings, a producer’s perspective and how consumers interact with audio. For more information on the event topic and speakers, see the Talking Audio event page. You don't need to buy a ticket to join us.

Vikki and Joan will be hosting in the North Bridge Room at the Publishing Scotland offices in Edinburgh from 5.30 to 7pm for chat, viewing and refreshments. If you are interested in coming, email [email protected].

The Flexible Workforce Development Fund is available to all Scottish employers, including small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The Fund supports businesses in Scotland to up-skill and re-skill their employees to support inclusive economic growth in Scotland. The deadline for applications is 31 July 2022. Eligible applications will be approved on a “first-come, first-served” basis so you are advised to apply early.

There are still places on Further Proofreading in June – if you are interested, please sign up now. Remember that members can attend the BIC Thema sessions free and get Friends of BIC rates on other BIC training courses. You can also book now for our autumn courses.

In addition we held a great session last week called Money Talks. Organised by Publishing Scotland in partnership with The Society of Authors, the event brought together a panel of experienced book trade professionals (Kate Gibb from Canongate, Davinder Bedi from Booksource, Marie Moser from the Edinburgh Bookshop, Nicola Solomon from the Society of Authors and Heather Parry (Chair)) to demystify where the money goes from the sale of a book and why. You can watch it online.

For details of all our courses, see the Publishing Scotland website.

We have met with the sales team at EIBF to discuss the opportunities for members to sell titles in the festival shop. We were very aware that 2020 and 2021 were challenging with a significant drop in sales.

The reality is that the space given over to bookselling will never compare to previous years as the festival site is altogether smaller. We are not able to change the amount of space allocated to us but we will be working with the EIBF sales team to improve the visibility of the Scottish publishers space with shelf-talkers, company names and highlight areas.

The space this year will be the same as in 2021 at the Old Fire Station on Lauriston Place. There will be a new entrance and exit to the shop this year to encourage better flow of customers from the shop to the festival site. There will be several bays and tables for publishers to merchandise titles as well as being included in other genres within the retail space; publishers will be rotated over the course of the 3 weeks. There is a new signing tent on site this year with a bookselling area as well as bookselling in the Central Hall (their large event venue); so we hope some additional sales opportunities will arise from previous years.

Here is the timeline for inclusion:

By the end of June publishers will be asked to submit list of titles for inclusion in bookshop, with a maximum of 10 titles – they suggest newly published or backlist relevant to the themes of the Festival.

 

During July the book festival sales team will place orders with Booksource/distributors/direct with publisher for any titles not already picked up through events/backlist ordering.

By end July Publishing Scotland will supply publisher shelf talkers and additional merchandising and marketing material on behalf of members. e.g. publisher name & logo

Small blurb about the publisher, a QR code linking to their website.

13 August - the Book Festival opens

23 August - Publishing Scotland Summer Drinks Reception on site at the festival.

The Beauty That Surrounds Us highlights books that stirs the senses and reimagine the world around you. You can read the issue here.

The June issue, Sanctuary, will be guest-edited by the Scottish BPOC Writer’s Network will be published next week. If you want to submit to future issues here are the themes:

July/August – Summer Reading: Books that celebrate Scotland as a destination, books for getaway reading

September – Pause: Books that nourish any of the senses

October - Beyond borders: Books that have an international outlook

November/December- Festive Reading and Gifts

Any enquiries please contact Vikki Reilly.

The Business of Book is aimed at writers, publishing professionals, programmers and anyone wishing to learn more about the book trade.

Celebrating Inclusion (25 August) will mark the launch of the Inklusion Guide written by Scottish disabled writers Julie Farrell and Ever Dundas. Inspired by the authors’ passionate desire to make literature events more accessible, the Inklusion Guide, published and distributed by Penguin Random House UK this summer, is a free, easy-to-use guide to making literature events accessible for disabled people. The event, chaired by disability activist Sinéad Burke, features Ever and Julie alongside Jenny Kumar (Literature Alliance Scotland) and Zaahida Nabagereka (Head of Social Impact at Penguin Random House UK), with a reading from disabled writer and poet Jeda Pearl.

The Scottish Spoken Word Showcase (23 August) celebrates the strength and diversity of Scotland’s spoken word scene and shows how live literature is bouncing back after the challenges of the pandemic. Hosted by poet and Creative Director of I Am Loud Poets Productions, Kevin Mclean, the showcase, run in partnership with Creative Scotland, features nine artists from across Scotland: Bee Asha Singh, BEMZ, Dave Hook, Gray Crosbie, Jo Gilbert, Kevin P. Gilday, Victoria McNulty and Mae Diansangu. While playing to a live audience, this event also has strategic aims to showcase Scottish talent to international industry contacts and connect spoken word performers to professional opportunities outside of Scotland.

Shaping Scotland’s Stories: New Voices Showcase (22 August) presents a taste of Scotland’s new literary voices and the independent publishers responsible for bringing their stories to the world. Presented in partnership with Publishing Scotland, it features a special reading from Glasgow-based poet Anna Cheung and is chaired by Scottish broadcaster and author Sally Magnusson. In the event, authors are joined on stage by their publishers for a discussion about the importance of seeking out and publishing new voices to shape Scotland's stories.

Beneath the Covers: Best Marketing Strategies of 2022 (15 August), presented in partnership with The Bookseller, offers insider perspectives on creative book marketing with some of the professionals shortlisted for the 2022 British Book Awards. Founders of Edinburgh indie publisher 404 Ink Heather McDaid and Laura Jones discuss their innovative Inklings series, alongside Faber’s Jess Kim and Niriksha Bharadia, the marketers behind Sally Rooney’s latest bestseller, Beautiful World, Where Are You.

In recognition of the Book Festival’s first year of running the YA (Young Adult) Book Prize in partnership with The Bookseller, the programme also includes a panel on The Evolution of Young Adult Literature (26 August) involving award-winning YA authors Juno Dawson and Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé. Hosted by the Chair of the YA Book Prize, Caroline Carpenter, the event explores how writing for young adults has evolved over the decades, offering subtle explorations of complex and sensitive topics.

The central role of literary agents in the publishing process is explored in Call My Agent! The Role of the Literary Agent (24 August). Heather Parry, co-founder of Extra Teeth literary magazine and the Society of Authors’ Senior Policy and Liaison Manager for Scotland, joins an impressive line-up of literary agents from across the UK to find out what agents look for in submissions, and to discuss the most successful tactics for building writers’ careers.

Tickets for The Business of Books events are Pay What You Can, available to book on the website from 10am on Thursday 23 June – at the same time as the full public programme goes on sale.

ALL TOGETHER NOW is the theme of the 2022 Edinburgh Book Festival programme. Explore now and join the festival in August for over 600 in-person and online events, featuring everyone from politicians to graphic novelists, actors to chefs and stars to storytellers. Tickets go on sale 23 June. 

Timothy David Cornwell, journalist and editor. Born: 6 November 1962 in Königswinter, West Germany. Died: 31 May, Rothbury, Northumberland.

The Guardian, David Robinson.

The full line-up for Independent Bookshop Week 2022 has been revealed, with a new cohort of bookshops opening and authors such as Kate Mosse, Shon Faye, A M Dassu and Sarah Winman making appearances. This year's celebration of independent bookshops takes place between 18-25 June, with Hachette as headline sponsor.

The 2022 Management Committee nominations are open. With four spaces available they aim to ensure the SoA board is representative of their diverse author community.

Deadline: 15 July.

Events and opportunities

Scottish Books International Author International Travel Fund is still open for applications, and we have supported 18 Scottish writers since reopening the fund in February. The fund is open to professional Scottish writers with a demonstrable track record of work. Applications are welcome from the writers themselves or from the organisation who has invited the writer, for a maximum of £1000 to support travel costs towards the trip.

Our strand of YOS events continues and we are partnering with Borders Book Festival next month - don't miss out on this brilliant event:

Shaping Scotland’s Stories with Sue Lawrence, Jean Findlay and Flora Johnston.

How do past events resonate today? A trio of brilliant historical fiction writers have written novels that explore power, ambition, and the price of non-conformity - particularly for women – set against backdrops including the Stuart court in Scotland and London, and the covenanting movement. Thursday 16 June, 7.45pm.

 

This year’s conference has a specific focus on storytelling and place, which will offer opportunities to explore the power and variety of the Highlands and Islands creative economy, whilst also emphasising the global provenance of the region and how it speaks to the international marketplace. A variety of great speakers across the 2 days.

Apply by Friday 10 June for this full-time, permanent position in Dalkeith.

Apply by Sunday 12 June 2022 for this 35 days contract to run June/July – November. 

Apply by Thursday 23 June 2022 for this permanent position.

Apply by Friday 1 July 2022 for this part-time position.

Apply as soon as possible for this full-time, permanent position (Edinburgh and home working).